Notification

Urchin WebAnalytics Software is discontinued and is no longer supported. All Urchin documentation applies only to the Urchin product as it was at the time of discontinuation, and does not apply to any Google Analytics products or services.

Why does Urchin 4 report a higher than expected number of Netscape browsers?

The most common reason for Urchin to report a higher number of Netscape browsers in the Browsers report is that a significant number of Web spiders and robots report themselves as "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)" or something similiar. Based on this string, Urchin will report hits from these spiders/robots as "Netscape 3.0". Another clue is that this is happening is that the Top Combos report will show a corresponding large number of "Netscape 3.0 - (unknown)" entries. Since no platform information is reported, Urchin puts these hits in the (unknown) category.

Most well-behaved spiders/robots will correctly report themselves as the actual entity they are - e.g. Googlebot, FAST WebCrawaler, Scooter, etc. You may want to have a look at the Web Robots Page for further information on robots/spiders and how best to handle them. In addition, you can use the filtering capabilities of Urchin to strip out unwanted hits from spiders and robots.

Search
Clear search
Close search
Main menu
4183433017669946156
true
Search Help Center
true
true
true
false
false